Hello freakazoid! Love your preNXE theme. In my opinion easily the best FSD theme (even better than your other themes). So good in fact its the only theme I can even bare to use after I was forced to update to FSD after seeing the awful changes they made in the stock 14699 "metro" dash.
Anyway while your theme is great it has a few issues that (I hope) can be fixed/changed. As you can see in the screens below I made some basics changes but couldn't fix any of the serious problems because I'm no skinner like yourself.
Some of the things I was able to change myself include...
-cleaned up xbox 360 logo by removing the tiny tradmarks. (guess you didnt notice them or werent bothered).
-removed the uneeded mask from the "latest games box". In my opinion looks better without it and more faithful to the original "blades" dash. Also icons arent dark now which looks much better.
-removed the sports silhouettes from the boxes. this was just a miner annoyance but I'd rather not have them unless I was going for a sports theme lol.
Now onto things I couldnt manage to change myself that would require your skinning skills.
1. remove system link patched text. dont need that front and center reminding me my system link is patched lol. removing it would be best.
2. this isnt a big deal but if you could get the disc tray to display the proper messages that would be amazing (seen other themes do this. so should be possible). right now its just a generic "play game" message no matter what state the drive is actually in.
3. gamercard could use a little cleanup. maybe make the gamerzone customizable.
4. remove "games" from the end. kinda redundant since we are already on the "games" blade. would prefer "Xbox 360" "Xbox Live Arcade" "Xbox" and maybe change emulators or homebrew to "Kinect" like some other themes have.
1. The thing that bothers me most! (yes Im weird lol). The first item always looks selected! This makes it look like 2 things are selected. Either make the embedded effect work (like the ms blades dash did) or edit the background so the first bracket appears like the rest.
2. The boxart reflection animation effect is too small. Does not fit the entire cover and ruins the illusion. either make this align properly or remove it.
3. swapping the boxart and screenshot around would look better (in my opinion). boxart on left and screenshot on right would look more natural. not a big deal.
4. flip the rating and genre around and it would look much much better. Much better use of space.
5. (not pictured) If possible increase the description text size and make it have a auto scroll effect. this would be badass! right now the text is just barely legible at its current size.
- title update status is broke. no icon shown (enabled or disabled) and also does not display which version the update is (noticed other themes display this).
1. this probably isnt possible. make the video/pictues/music link to the NXE media sections? these shortcuts exist on the mini nxe guide so might be possible to incorporate into the skin?
Hope you one day read this and make a future update to your fantastic preNXE skin! Will be waiting for updates
-Thanks